And here we have to say that Newton was a lot clearer about the status of what he called "axioms" and "laws" of motion than were later generations who looked on them as universal, and perhaps providential, truths about the cosmos. It took Henri Poincaré's hard work and careful analysis to bring out the fact that what was perhaps the most promising candidate of the three laws for empirical status and testable content, the Second Law -- nowadays rendered as "Force equals mass times acceleration," -- was not in fact a testable, falsifiable claim about the cosmos or the things in it. Poincaré showed that there was no way of measuring each of the three components, the force, the mass and the acceleration independently in any concrete situation and that therefore no experiment could bring the law to the test. And so too for the other two of Newton's three "laws" of dynamics.
^^^^^^^ CB: This sounds like quantum mechanics . _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
